


First

by PenguinofProse



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Episode: s04e13 Praimfaya - Time Jump, F/M, First Kiss, Like so heavily implied, Making sense of 7.07, implied bellarke, spacekru
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-02
Updated: 2020-07-02
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:07:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25039717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PenguinofProse/pseuds/PenguinofProse
Summary: A re-framing of that Becho flashback on the Ring from episode 7.07. Becho on the Ring with a bedrock of implied Bellarke.
Relationships: Bellamy Blake/Clarke Griffin, Bellamy Blake/Echo
Comments: 29
Kudos: 59





	First

**Author's Note:**

> Hello and welcome to a re-framing of that Becho on the Ring flashback from episode 7.07, because that one random out of context scene didn't do anyone any favours. As ever, please don't read this and then complain about it if you are not a fan of any of the characters or ships involved - I promise there are loads of other fics out there you would prefer!
> 
> Happy reading!

First, there was Clarke. There was that little half-smile she used to wear, more for his benefit than her own. There was the way her hair would catch the light, even in the darkest of times. There were handcuffs and tears, lists and hugs.

And even when he was with Gina, somehow, he was still more devoted to Clarke.

She didn't like him at first, and that was no secret. But then he fell in love with her, hard and fast, until the day when the radiation took her and he didn't even get to say a last goodbye.

…...

Bellamy didn't think about much beyond Clarke's death, those first few days and weeks and months on the Ring. That's not to say he didn't function, or didn't pull his weight. He stuck to his word, given in that conversation with Raven on day one, because he was determined not to let Clarke die in vain.

But beneath the mask he wore, the superficial veneer of holding-it-together, he thought about almost nothing but Clarke. He thought about the last words he should have said, that day with the death wave bearing down on them. He thought about the first day he fell in love with her, as they sat together, high and yet running on empty, beneath a tree, beside the body of a boy who should have been a friend.

It was fortunate that there were no armies to massacre on the Ring, nor anyone much to lash out at. He was hurting worse than he had ever hurt in his life, he was pretty sure. But he did a decent job of pretending to be functional – at least when out and about on the space station, in the presence of his friends.

Only Raven saw through it.

"Your knuckles are bleeding again."

He shrugged. He punched walls a lot in his room. In the grand scheme of things, he thought that was a decent outcome, considering he recently left the best friend he happened to be in love with behind to die. That level of distress could be reasonably expected to lead to some more dramatic behavioural symptoms, he reckoned. He was doing OK if bleeding knuckles was as bad as it got.

Raven disagreed, apparently. "You have to take care, Bellamy. We don't have a doctor to patch you up."

"I know." He bit out. "We left our doctor behind. Noticed that, did you?"

That wasn't fair. It was cruel, in fact – none of this was Raven's fault. But asking pointed questions seemed like a better idea than screaming his lungs out.

"You should find a healthier way to channel your feelings. I hear Echo's looking for a training buddy. She could teach you some fighting moves."

Just for a moment, he allowed himself to consider that. Beating up the spy did sound like a better idea than beating up himself.

…...

He didn't like Echo, at first. Obviously he didn't. She stabbed his sister not so long ago, killed Gina before that, and held a sword to Clarke's throat in between. So yeah, naturally, she was pretty much the last person he would have chosen to be stuck in a tin can in the sky with.

There was more to it than that, though. There was something about the way Clarke had suggested saving her, but then she had lived while Clarke died. It felt too much like a straightforward exchange – like maybe if _Echo_ was the one who was dead, Clarke would be alive.

He would do anything – absolutely anything – for the chance to make that exchange.

So he didn't like Echo, but that was no barrier to training with her. If anything, it was a good thing – he didn't feel guilty at all when he let fists fly with more grief than control.

It made him remember why he shot three hundred grounders, before. It made him remember that letting lose the darkness inside of him was sometimes the only way to process pain. And this was safer than that, too – Echo could always beat him, so it didn't much matter if he went all in to give vent to his demons.

"You have to be calmer." She recommended, one day, a couple of months into their training sessions, when he still had not won a bout.

He snorted. Calm didn't sound plausible, just now.

"You have to be more disciplined." She continued. "You have to think through your moves, not just lash out."

No. He was not about to stay there and listen to that. He could not tolerate Echo telling him to think rather than feel, bordering on some analogy about hearts and heads.

Clarke said that first.

He scrambled back to his feet and strode from the room.

…...

He got better at fighting, gradually. He learnt to switch off his grief – or at least block it out – and focus on the moment.

Fist – swing – leg – tuck.

Block – punch – block – parry.

He wondered if that was what Echo meant, by telling him to be calmer and more disciplined. He wasn't about to ask her, though, because he wasn't about to invite her to engage in a conversation that would take her over ground Clarke had trodden first.

He asked her about other things, sometimes. He asked her about her childhood and got nothing useful in return. He asked her about her parents, and was met with brutal silence.

She didn't exactly invite affection, at first.

He hit upon a better topic, eventually. He realised she could talk all day long about her work.

"The bow is your main weapon, right?" He asked one morning.

"Yeah. It was – I don't know if it counts any more, now I live in the sky."

"It still counts. I'm still a soldier." He offered.

She looked sharply at him. "You're not a soldier. You're a leader."

"I'm a lieutenant." He corrected her sadly.

He was a lieutenant, and he'd abandoned his commanding officer. And now, he was beginning to suspect, he was no one.

…...

The conversations they shared around their training sessions grew more extensive, but they never really grew more _involved_. By the time they'd been on the Ring two years, Bellamy still knew more about how Echo fletched her arrows than how she felt about anything of importance.

"Tell me more about Roan." He invited her, as he crouched on the floor, recovering his breath, and tried not to notice the glint in her eyes at her success.

He'd been noticing little things like that recently. He wasn't sure what to make of it. Maybe it was just a sign that he was feeling lonely, he figured – that would make sense, after two years without Clarke.

She shrugged. "I was devoted to him from the first moment I met him. Then he banished me."

It was a short and heartbreaking story, he had to admit. He might not have liked Echo in the beginning, but he wouldn't wish that on anyone.

"Devoted to him?" He queried, wondering quite what she meant.

Her face was carefully impassive, as it usually was. "Devoted." She repeated. "That's Azgeda. That's life in the queen's guard. He had my loyalty. Sometimes I thought he had my heart. I never really tried to separate the two."

"You didn't?" He couldn't imagine living like that. Clarke had both his loyalty and his heart, and he was clear on that from the very beginning of their partnership.

"What would be the point? I was his spy, nothing more, nothing less."

She had an odd attitude to relationships, this woman, he decided. An odd attitude to loyalty, and to love, and to everything in between.

…...

It was half way through the third year that he found himself in trouble.

He was just lonely, he told himself at first. That was why he kept looking at Echo's lips all the damn time. She didn't even have particularly nice lips – they were nothing at all like Clarke's.

Not that Clarke was the standard for all beauty, of course. It's just – he loved her first, remember? He loved her _most,_ even now. Even when she was dead, and gone, and burnt to crumbling ashes.

He found himself struggling when Echo would pay him awkward little compliments. She'd thank him for making him feel welcome, making him feel part of the team. She'd laugh at his jokes, or tell him he was coming out with _good moves_.

But it wasn't until they started talking about things that mattered that he really found himself in danger.

"You're missing your sister." She observed, when she came upon him staring out of the window, down at the scorched Earth.

He nodded. He _was_ missing his sister, so it seemed sensible to go along with it. More sensible than admitting that, however much he was missing his sister, he was missing Clarke more. He knew he'd see Octavia again one day. But he knew that there was absolutely no hope of holding Clarke in his arms ever again.

"She'll be waiting for you. She really loves you." Echo commented, presumably trying to sound helpful.

The problem was, it was a bit too easy to suspend sanity for a moment and pretend those words were about someone else. It was a bit too easy to pretend that Clarke might still be breathing, and they might be talking about her.

"I hope so. I'd do anything for her." He said, throat thick with grief.

"I know. Bellamy – about that time -"

He shook his head, cautioning her into silence. He couldn't talk about guilt, not today.

…...

Too many things happened all at once. That's the way he would look at it later. The third anniversary of Clarke's death had him feeling fragile, willing to do almost anything to forget. His first victory in a training bout against Echo had him almost giddy with jubilation.

Desperate grief and shocked success could make for a rather toxic cocktail, it turned out.

He beat Echo. Then he teased her a little – silly suggestions that she couldn't handle it. And then she paid him another of those awkward compliments.

She told him that she didn't think he had any weaknesses.

That was it. That broke him, broke the last of his resolve. They spoke for a moment or two about Octavia, but all the while, his heart was pounding in his ears.

Clarke was his weakness. Clarke had always been his weakness, and it was beginning to feel like she would always be his weakness – forever and ever until he died alone.

He was done with it. He was so, completely done with it.

He was sick of grieving alone. Maybe that made him a bad person – maybe he ought to stay loyal to her memory a bit longer. But he just couldn't do it any more.

He'd always found sex a good distraction from his troubles, before now. When his sister was locked up, and when he first went to the ground. When Clarke left him after Mount Weather and when the word was ending and he found himself at Jasper's last party for the end of days.

He didn't see why it shouldn't work now.

"Think you could be loyal to us?" He asked her. He had to ask her that, first. He had to know that he wasn't about to get himself hurt all over again – this was supposed to distract him from his pain, not cause more of it.

"I'd like that." She said, with a hint of a smile.

And that was that. He leaned in. She spluttered in confusion that _this isn't real_ but he ignored her.

He ignored her, because he already knew that. He knew that nothing in his life would ever feel real again. Because whatever he might do with Echo, he loved Clarke first.

So he did it. He kissed her first.

And she kissed him back, and it escalated. Even though her lips were wrong. Even though everything about this was wrong, because she wasn't Clarke.

"Are you sure?" She asked him, as they found themselves in his bedroom, shedding their clothes.

He snorted. Of course he wasn't sure. He hadn't been sure about anything since the day he left Clarke to burn on Earth.

Uncertainty was a pretty common side effect of losing his head, he suspected.

…...

It was awkward, at first. Their friends were confused and surprised – they'd seen a growing training partnership, and maybe even a friendship, but they hadn't seen love.

Bellamy hadn't seen love either, to be fair. He'd seen a measly sticking plaster to slap over a gaping stab wound. But it was better than nothing.

He wondered if that made him a monster. He was using Echo, pure and simple. Sure, he liked her, mostly, but not as much as he ought to like someone he seemed to have found himself in a relationship with.

He decided in the end that it didn't make him as much of a monster as she had ever been. He'd forgiven her and all, but that didn't change the fact she'd done those things, in her previous life as a spy.

It didn't change the fact that he'd hated her, first.

…...

It was almost worse when it got less awkward. The problem was that, as they started to settle into their relationship, he actually found things about her he could love.

She was strong-willed in a way that reminded him of Clarke, sometimes. Pragmatic, too, with a certain instinct for strategic thought. He was fully aware that loving the aspects of her personality which reminded him of someone long-dead was not really loving her at all, but he didn't care.

It wasn't as if Echo had any delusions about what was going on here, anyway.

"Don't you want to come and play cards?" She asked him, exactly four years to the day since he left Clarke to die.

"No."

"Monty says there's moonshine -"

"I'm not coming, Echo. I need to stay home tonight." He swallowed heavily. He'd been with Echo for a year now. Maybe it was time to go crazy and start telling her the kind of things he'd been comfortable telling Clarke since day one of their friendship. "It's four years today. I just need some time alone."

Echo nodded. "I get it. You loved her first."

With that, she strode from the room. Bellamy wondered if, maybe, he was quite lucky that he'd found Echo to distract him through the time after Clarke.

…...

Echo was worried about going back to the ground. She talked about it a lot. Bellamy found it annoying, to begin with. By the time they were almost ready to leave the Ring, he only found it deeply dull.

He got it. Really he did. He had traumatic memories of the ground, too. She was still grief-stricken over her last conversation with Roan. He was still grief-stricken over his last conversation with Clarke.

A healthy couple might have shared their grief, and bonded, and healed. But they'd never quite made it as far as the status of a truly healthy couple, he found.

"What if everything changes on the ground?" She asked, one evening. "What if I become that cold spy again?"

He sighed. "Nothing will change. I'll still be me, you'll still be you."

"That's good. I think I'm a different person with you."

Sometimes Bellamy wondered whether he was a different person with Echo, too. But mostly he concluded that he was just a different person without Clarke.

The thing was that, despite all this, he found himself loving Echo. It wasn't the same kind of all-consuming love he'd felt for Clarke. It was more a mix of gratitude and desire, tempered with a surprising amount of affection. The two of them had been able to help each other out, up here. They'd been able to heal together, and move on with each other's help, and keep one another sane.

He genuinely loved her, even though he would always love Clarke first.

…...

So much for _nothing will change on the ground_ , Bellamy thought, when the child ran through the trees and told him Clarke was alive. If Clarke really was still breathing, that changed _everything_. It had to – she was Clarke.

He didn't believe her at first. Madi, her name turned out to be. It wasn't until Monty had asked a question or two and the child had started dragging him around by the hand that he really allowed himself to have hope.

"How did she survive all this time?" He asked Madi, puzzled and shocked and exultant, all at once.

"Nightblood for the radiation. This green space for food. Calling you on the radio every day to keep herself sane."

That hurt. That hurt so much he actually stopped jogging for a moment, stumbling to a flustered halt, even though he knew he needed to make haste to get to Clarke.

She called him on the radio every day? She remained devoted to him – loving and loyal – even when he was kissing Echo? Even when he was the one who kissed Echo _first_?

He couldn't have known, he tried to convince himself. He had every reason to believe she was dead. But he couldn't quite convince himself of that, somehow. Now that he was on the ground again, so close to being reunited to the woman who would always be the head to his heart, he couldn't entirely convince himself to listen to that logical argument.

There was only one solution to this, he decided. He would have to do better. He would have to be honest with Clarke when he was reunited with her, and pick up where he should have left off six years ago. He would have to make up for lost time and show her just how much he loved her, and to do that he would have to put an end to things with Echo.

That might be tough, in some ways. He'd been with Echo for the last three years, and you can't just forget someone you've loved like that at the drop of a hat.

But the bottom line was simple, wasn't it? He loved Clarke first.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
